Avoiding Toxic Store Receipts

You've likely heard about BPA - Bisphenol A. It's a type of plastic that has been (and sometimes is still being) used in canned food, baby bottles, plastic water bottles and store receipts (those thermal paper ones).

BPA is incredibly bad for humans and is a known endocrine disruptor. Research indicates that BPA is linked to an increased risk of breast and prostate cancers, cardiovascular disease, and reproductive and brain development abnormalities. New studies even suggest it may be connected to autism spectrum disorder.

Pretty much everyone agrees that BPA is Bad News!

So what can we do about it? One option is to only buy plastic consumer goods that are labelled BPA-Free... although that is no guarantee that the item is actually free of BPA. Another option is to use glass and metal containers instead of plastic containers... good-bye vintage Tupperware. And definitely never ever microwave food in plastic containers... ever. BPA leaches out of plastic even faster when it's heated up... one of the reasons why plastic water bottles should not be left in the sun.

These are all good options but... one scientist noted that the really bad culprit is... thermal paper receipts. Apparently, “there's more BPA in a single thermal paper receipt than the total amount that would leach out from a polycarbonate water bottle used for many years" (see 2014 Consumer Reports).

This is bad news for store cashiers but also anyone who needs to handle receipts for accounting purposes. And it's not just store receipts. Thermal paper receipts are used for:

• airline boarding passes
• airline luggage tags
• train tickets
  
• movie tickets
• sporting event tickets
• amusement park tickets
• prescription bottle labels
• packaged supermarket items such as deli meats and cheeses
• fax paper
• lottery tickets

Yikes! So what is the solution? Well... there are a few options:

1. Wear those blue nitrile gloves when handling receipts.
2. Decline paper receipts wherever you have the option of getting an emailed receipt.
3. Don't carry receipts loose in your wallet, where the BPA can rub off on other things. Store them in a plastic bag.
4. Wash your hands (with soap and water) as soon as possible after touching receipts.
5. Don't use alcohol-based sanitizers before or after handling receipts since that just increases the skin's ability to absorb BPA! Well... that's fun in the age of Covid when we are all using hand sanitizers like mad.
6. Don't handle thermal paper if you are pregnant... and keep it away from kids too. Prenatal and early life exposure to BPA poses the greatest potential health risks.
   

This sudden interest in BPA was triggered for me by a receipt that I received from a local grocery store.

The backside of the receipt is not typical of other receipts. See... it's made by EcoChit and states that the paper is (a) sustainably sourced, (b) 100% BPA and BPS free and (c) One tree planted for every case of paper used.

Loud kudos to Country Grocer for going this route! I had a look at a stack of other receipts on my desk...

• Lowes
• Superstore
• Mobil Gas Bar
• Shopper's Drug Mart
• Winners
• Home Depot
• various credit card machine receipts

Out of all of those, only Winners has a note on the back of their receipt saying it is BPA-Free. Home Depot has an FSC notice - that the paper is from responsible sources, but nothing about BPA.

There is a call to ban toxic thermal paper receipts in Canada, particularly from the UCFW union. I did find news that Loblaws (Superstore & Shopper's Drug Mart) plans to ban all Bisphenols (BPA, BPS and others) from their receipts by the end of 2021. So that is good news. But isn't it about time that this went Canada-wide...

Canada banned BPA from baby bottles in 2010, declaring it a toxic substance. But Canada did not ban it from all food and consumer products. Due to consumer concern, however, many companies did voluntarily remove BPA from their products. Home Depot receipts. for example, have been BPA free for over 10 years. So is all of this just a moot point?

Nope... you see, many companies just phased out BPA and used BPS or other Bisphenols instead. Sigh. All of which are just as toxic as BPA. Seriously...

So, I went and had a look at the EcoChit site which produces the Country Grocer receipts. Those receipts are completely phenol free but do use a chemical called Pergafast instead of the phenols... What is this stuff?

Well, Pergafast is also a chemical but... it would appear that it is much less easily absorbed into the skin than BPA and BPS... at least according to a 2015 study.

All of this does make me wonder why Canada doesn't just ban all phenol products... In the meantime, maybe it's time to praise the likes of Country Grocer and Loblaws and start poking at places like Home Depot...